She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career.

Her mother, Kathleen Ruhl, studied theater at Smith College[3] and earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric from the University of Illinois and became an English teacher, as well as an actress and a theatre director.

[4] Beginning in the fourth grade, Ruhl received dramatic training at the Piven Theatre Workshop, in Evanston, Illinois.

[5] On the occasion of a 2015 production at Piven of her Melancholy Play, Ruhl credited the institution with teaching her about the role of language and narration in theater.

[6] When Ruhl was twenty, in August 1994, her father died of cancer after fighting the disease for two years, an event that would have a profound impact on her and her art.

[8] She graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in English (1997), with her undergraduate work including a year spent at Pembroke College, Oxford.

[7] Sarah Ruhl currently teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

[10] Director Joyce Piven later helmed the show again in March 2003 at The Actors' Gang, Hollywood, California, with Polly Noonan taking on the title role.

[15] The Lady with the Lap Dog, and Anna Around the Neck (adapted from Anton Chekhov) were commissioned and produced by the Piven Theatre Workshop in 2001.

[28] Her play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage premiered Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on February 23, 2017 in previews, officially on March 20, 2017, directed by Rebecca Taichman.

[29] The cast featured Lena Hall, Marisa Tomei, Brian Hutchison, David McElwee, Naian González Norvind, Omar Metwally, Austin Smith, and Robin Weigert.

[30][31] For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon on August 18, 2017 (previews), directed by Les Waters and featuring Kathleen Chalfant and Lisa Emery.

[33] Becky Nurse of Salem premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre on December 19, 2019, directed by Anne Kauffman and featured Pamela Reed as the title character.

[34] She is an active member of New Dramatists, a development space for new playwrights that is in partnership with the NYU Tisch Graduate Acting Program.

"The play takes place in a 'metaphysical Connecticut' where married doctors employ a Brazilian housekeeper who is more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in cleaning.

The play explores the use and understanding of language, an interest which she shared with her father:[8] Each Saturday, from the time Ruhl was five, Patrick took his daughters to the Walker Brothers Original Pancake House for breakfast and taught them a new word, along with its etymology.

(The language lesson and some of Patrick's words—"ostracize," "peripatetic," "defunct"—are memorialized in the 2003 Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth from his inamorata's point of view, in which the dead Father, reunited with his daughter, tries to re-teach her lost vocabulary.

[43] Passion Play made its New York City premiere in Spring 2010 in a production by the Epic Theatre Ensemble at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn.

[44] Each part of the trilogy depicts the staging of a Passion Play at a different place and during a different historical period: Elizabethan England, Nazi Germany, and the United States from the time of the Vietnam War until the present.

[50] Ruhl explains, One physician quoted in the book [The Technology of the Orgasm] argued that at least three-fourths of women had ailments that could be cured by the vibrator.

Playwright creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war.

"[8]In a discussion with Paula Vogel for BOMB Magazine, Ruhl described the psychology of her plays as "putting things up against Freud ... it's a more medieval sensibility of the humors, melancholia, black bile, and transformation."

The Steinberg committee said, in part: "Her work sparks conversation in audiences of all ages with its emotionally vivid language [...] Sarah Ruhl is unique.